US, Japan must understand China

By John Lee 李約翰

In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Friday last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe informed the audience of officials, experts and journalists that Japan is “back” and will not stand down in its ongoing sovereignty dispute with China over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), which are also claimed by Taiwan, and are known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan.

With Chinese provocations on the rise, US President Barack Obama, Abe’s host, appealed for calm and restraint on both sides.

Japan is likely to accede to the US request, as it remains dependent on its alliance with the US for its security. However, it will be difficult to persuade China that it should stand down.

China’s assertiveness over its sovereignty claim reflects more than a desire to exploit seabed resources, or to gain a widened strategic gateway into the western Pacific. It is also about national renewal and rejuvenation — the core of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) raison d’etre. Turning away from a fight with its former occupier and historical rival would be a step back in this six-decade-long quest.

The idea of Chinese renewal or rejuvenation was popularized by then-premier Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) in the late 1980s and frequently promoted by former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and outgoing President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).

Most recently, Chinese Vice President and leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping (習近平), visiting the National Museum of China’s Road Toward Renewal exhibition, pledged to continue the “great renewal of the Chinese nation.”

What does this “renewal” or “rejuvenation” mean to the Chinese?

All nations — great and small — embody a combination of historical fact and myth. In this case, the CCP’s view of rejuvenation is built on the belief that the zenith of Chinese power under the Ming and Qing dynasties represents the natural, just and permanent state of affairs for a 5,000-year-old civilization.

When former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) took power in 1949, his immediate goal was to re-establish the “greater China” of the Qing Dynasty, insisting that the Manchu-led empire was the permanent and enduring China. However, while the assault on the Qing Dynasty by foreign powers is historical fact, the notion that there has been one enduring China struggling against avaricious outsiders across several millennia is false and self-serving.

Mao achieved his goal following the so-called peaceful liberation of the East Turkestan Republic (now China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) in 1949 and the invasion of Tibet in 1950, which increased China’s size by more than one-third.

Every CCP leader since has carried forward Mao’s vision of a greater China, adjusting and expanding it as the country’s power grows. For example, China showed little interest in the Diaoyutai Islands prior to 1968 — the year a geographical study pointed to vast oil reserves beneath the seabed.

The same can be said for China’s growing stridency with respect to its claims in the South China Sea. In 2009, relying heavily on a dubious historical claim, China formally tabled its “nine-dotted line” map to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and has since referred to almost all of the South China Sea as being under its “indisputable sovereignty.”

Having dominated East and Southeast Asia for all but the last two centuries of the past two millennia, China is chafing at the current US-led regional order of sovereign states, in which even the smallest enjoys the same rights, privileges and protection as the largest. Modern China has benefited enormously from this arrangement; nonetheless there is resentment that the Chinese civilization-state’s vast achievements over several thousand years offer China no special status.